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There is a size limit on wooden ships due to leaking between the
planks. If you made a wooden ship the size of Noah's ark it would
sink pretty quickly even in a calm sea.

Hogging and breaching are the main problems with large ships.
There have also been found ships built with cord that used the swelling of
the wood in a flexible design to minimize leaks.

Most amusing (assuming flat seas ) is that the "solution" to hogging and
breaching can be found in the middle of the USA, right where the fundie
mindset is greatest.
I've yet to see a fundie use it.

Just ask Sam Clemmons.

I read Life on the Mississippi, but I don't remember anything therein
that would help an impossibly large boat float. Incidentally, I had
to look up "hogging" and "breaching" but I already understood their
consequences. The massive flexing of the ark would make it
unfloatable in anything other than a permanently calm sea. This is
why wooden ships topped out at a much smaller size, or became somewhat
sphere-like in shape. An ark of the dimensions cited in the Bible
would only float through divine grace, which then makes you wonder why
God went through that whole flood nonsense instead of just pronouncing
everyone but Noah and his family dead. It's a good thing Hitler
didn't have a magic ark and a magic rainstorm or he might have tried
it, too.

There is a size limit on wooden ships due to leaking between the
planks. If you made a wooden ship the size of Noah's ark it would
sink pretty quickly even in a calm sea.

Hogging and breaching are the main problems with large ships.
There have also been found ships built with cord that used the
swelling of the wood in a flexible design to minimize leaks.

Most amusing (assuming flat seas ) is that the "solution" to hogging
and breaching can be found in the middle of the USA, right where the
fundie mindset is greatest.
I've yet to see a fundie use it.

Just ask Sam Clemmons.

I read Life on the Mississippi, but I don't remember anything therein
that would help an impossibly large boat float. Incidentally, I had
to look up "hogging" and "breaching" but I already understood their
consequences. The massive flexing of the ark would make it
unfloatable in anything other than a permanently calm sea. This is
why wooden ships topped out at a much smaller size, or became somewhat
sphere-like in shape. An ark of the dimensions cited in the Bible
would only float through divine grace, which then makes you wonder why
God went through that whole flood nonsense instead of just pronouncing
everyone but Noah and his family dead. It's a good thing Hitler
didn't have a magic ark and a magic rainstorm or he might have tried
it, too.

I don't remember Clemmens writing about it but the river steamboat had a
partial solution. They ran cables from bow to stern and kept them under
tension, thus keeping the boat from hogging. The largest built however,
which approached Ark size ran aground and when the river dropped a bit it
split in half lengthwise.

Even allowing for building such a thing and assuming calm seas the volume is
not large enough for all the animals and barely bif enough for a food
supply.

Here follows more than you might want to know....

Obviously Woodmorappe hasn't a clue how much it takes to feed herbivores.
An elephant alone eats 300 pounds of hay a day. A horse eats about 30
pounds, a cow about 20-25, a bison about the same, a giraffe perhaps 100, a
rhinocerous about 175-200.
These are good estimated weights of the amount of food needed.

Two elephants 600 pounds per day for a year equals about 220,000 pounds of
hay.
Two rhino 146,000 pounds
Two horses 22,000 pounds
Two donkeys 22,000
Two waterbuffalo 20,000
Two zebra 22,000
Six cows 54,750
Two giraffe 73,000
Two bison 22,000
Six goats 9125
Six Sheep 9125

I'm not even going to try to figure out how much hay would be needed for
the rest of the deer, gnus, gaurs, springbok, sable antelope, but I'll add
another 200,000 pounds as a very low estimate.
So, a very rough and probably extremely low estimate is at least 900,000
pounds.
A bale of hay weighs about 50 pounds. Dimensions are 2 x 2 x 4 for total of
16 cu feet. Approximately 18,000 bales of hay.

Doing some calcs, gives us 288,000 cubic feet of hay. That's 10,666 cubic
yards of hay. I'm a bit hazy on football field dimensions but I think it's
50 yards wide, by 100 yards long (sorry, folks, sports aren't my strong
point). Anyway, that's 5,000 square yards of space. The amount of hay
would be stacked 2.13 layers high, a yard to a layer. For a total of
approximately 6.4 feet high covering a football field.

Not to mention the sheer volume excreted. Herbivores' digestive systems
aren't particularly efficient; most of what goes in comes out again.
Wonder how many shovels they had on the Ark? And how many hours per day
Noah, et. al. spent shoveling?
************************************************** ******************************

O-kay... my problem with _anyone_ who takes creationism seriously is that it
simply doesn't add up. Let's take my fav example, Ye Arke.
So, depending on what you use for a cubit, Ye Arke is about 450 feet long,75
wide, and 45 tall, right? I work best in metres, so lets do a bit of
conversion: that's 137.16 by 22.86 by 13.716 metres, right? For ease of
calculation, let's call it 140 x 23 x 14. This give you 45.080e+3 cubic
meters. One cubic meter of pure water is one metric tonne. Salt water is a
bit more dense. Be nice, add another thousand tonnes or so... Ye Arke
displaces 46,000 tonnes. Maybe 46,400 at max. And I'm being generous. (The
reader who knows something about ship-building will also spot a certain
minor problem with the above figures. No creationist has ever seen it... in
part 'cause if it's corrected, things get worse for Ye Arke.)

Problem 1: The sheer size. HMS _Victory_, still preserved at Portsmouth,
was 186 feet long on the gundeck. HMS _Victoria_, the last full-rigged
1strate ship of the line to serve as flag of the Channel Fleet, built in
1859, was 250 feet long on the gundeck. And she had a steel frame because
the RN had found that building wooden ships much bigger than 225 feet long
was not a good idea because they tended to straddle or to hog on being
launched; that is, they tended to bend, their bows and sterns to stick up
out of the water at an angle, (that's straddling) or to bend the other way,
the bows and sterns supported by waves but the midships sections out of the
water (or at least not as well supported) (that's hogging) and either way
their keels tended to crack under the strain. Even with steel frames, wooden
ships bigger than 250 feet long tended to hog or straddle. Don't take my
word for it, look it up for yourself. One possible source: _The Wooden
Fighting Ship In the Royal Navy, 897-1860_, EHH Archibald, Blandford Press,
London. Sorry, my copy was published back before ISBNs. Edward Archibald was
at the time of writing the curator of the National Maritime Museum,
Portsmouth, England. Or build a wooden boat 250 feet long and see what
happens. Ye Arke was the size of_two_ 1st rate line of battleships, laid
end-to-end. Noah was a shepherd. He knew better than the shipwrights at
Chatham who built the ships with which the RN dominated the world for 150
years? If I'm wrong, and it is possible to build a 450 foot wooden vessel,
by all means demonstrate it. I'll even put up some of the money... so long
as I get to record the launch of said vessel. And so long as those who say
that such a craft would be safe are willing to stay on it while it's being
launched. Me, I figure that I'd get some _great_ pix.

Problem 2: Even though it's too big to work, Ye Arke is _too small_ to do
its job. Noah was at sea for a year. The Bible explicitly states that he
carried food for himself, his family, and the animals... where did he put
it? John Woodmorappe (who is, BTW, a creationist) in his book _Noah's Ark: A
Feasibility Study_, published by the Institute for Creation Research, El
Cajon, California, (the ICR is not merely creationist; it _requires_ that
all who work there take an oath that they feel that the Bible is inerrant,
as demonstrated on their web site) calculates that Noah's ark carried 5.5
million kilos by weight of animals. (I disagree with this figure, as it's
much too low, but for purposes of argument I'll use it.) He also estimates
that each animal, on average, ate one thirtieth of its body weight per day.
Let's see... 5.5 million kilos is 5,500 tonnes. Divide by 30, multiply by
365... 66.917e+3. (Ye Arke was at sea for over a year, according to Gen 7and
8. I'll just use one year to keep things simple and to give Woody as much
slack as possible. Wouldn't want anyone to say that I was railroading him.)
Hmm. 67 thousand tonnes of food, by Woody's own figures. But... if you
remember, we calculated that Ye Arke could displace a max of 46,000tonnes,
or 46,400 if we were being generous. And that included the mass of the boat
itself, and the animals. (Archimedes' Principle, you know) Looks like y'all
need at least two Arkes just to carry the food. So where's the mention of
the Great Barge Fleet in the Bible? I once tried to work out just how big an
Arke would have had to have been to carry the assorted animals and their
food and have space for proper cages and exercise areas so that the animals'
muscles don't atrophy... after I got to 900,000 tonnes displacement and
still hadn't accounted for all the good stuff, I stopped. That's _three
times the size of a supertanker_. Or _nine times the size of a nuke aircraft
carrier_. There's simply no way that a wooden vessel could ever be that big.
No way at all.

Problem 3: In order to get the mass of the animals down, Woody pared things
down. He tried to define 'kind' so as to have, say, one pair of cat-like
what evers, and have all present day cats, from house cats to lions,
descendants of that pair. Nice... except that doing it that way _requires_
evolution on a scale so massive and rapid that _no_ evolutionary biologist
would dare suggest it. And Woody does that with _all_ animals... It's the
only way he could get 'em to fit.

Problem 4: Even after he pares down the list (he posits 15,754 'kinds') he
has a problem. In order for there to be physically enough space inside Ye
Arke, Woody uses the _median_ to work out the size of cages. He says that if
you have hippos, elephants, rats, and dogs, you can use the _median_ size
animal and build cages for 'em, and they'll all fit. The median size,
according to Woody, that of a sheep. Using that, he can shoehorn enough
cages into Ye Arke to hold his 15,754 kinds... but only just. And the cages
would be sized so that an animal in it would be able to stand up, but not
move about... which means it gets no exercise, and its muscles will atrophy.
And it won't live to see the end of the voyage. Unfortunately, Woody can't
think of any other way to fit 'em all in.

Problem 5: Remember that 67,000 tonnes of food? What goes in must come
out... Noah and his crew (all eight of 'em) are gonna be kinda busy moving
that 67,000 tonnes in one end, and removing the whatever amount of tonnes of
waste products out the other. _Each_ member of the crew would have about
2,000 'kinds' of animals to feed every day... and remember, some of those,
the clean ones, would be in sevens, and the others in pairs. Let's see.
15,754 divided by eight is a tad over 1,969. Number of seconds/day is
86,400.Noah & Co. had 43.875 _seconds_ per 'kind' per day if they worked
continously24/7 for the year they were at sea to feed and clean 'em. Must've
been trailing bloody Cherenkov radiation as they ran about the boat, or at
least sonic booms. And, of course, if there were more 'kinds' than Woody's
15,754,Noah & Co. would have had less time per 'kind', while if there were
less 'kinds', the hyperevolution problem would be worse.

Problem 6: Ye Floode itself. It covered the 'high hills and mountains'.
Hmm... Some creationists say that there was massive amounts of mountain
building post-Floode, which is why Everest, for example, is as tall as it
is. For the purposes of argument, I'll take 'em at their word. How tall
_were_ the 'high hills and mountains', though? 100 feet? 1000 feet? 2000
feet? Well, they'd better have been less than 250 feet, 'cause if you put
that much water above coral reefs, the reefs die. (You can check it for
yourself.) Every coral reef in the world should be dead... unless Noah
carried a few corals with him on Ye Arke, which gives him some extra
problems. And which is not supported by the Bible, anyway. It's easy to work
out how much water would be required for a Floode that size. Now, divide by
24 by 40, and you see how much fell per hour in the 40 days and 40 nights...
and that's one hell of a lot of water, even if you restrict it to 250 feet
extra. I've been in hurricanes. They didn't dump anywhere _near_ that kind
of water. Not even within three orders of magnitude. No way a wooden boat's
gonna survive that. None. I won't bother go into varves, sandstones, and
salt domes...

Problem 7: Plants. Not only would Noah have had to carry food for all the
animals (and, if predators such as tigers were then carnivores, this would
include extra animals to furnish food for said predators, while if they were
vegetarians, this would require extra fodder and an explanation as to when
and why they changed...) but he's gonna have to carry all the various plants
as well. All of them. Land plants don't care for major floods, and would all
die. Fresh-water plants don't like too much salt, and would all die. Marine
plants don't like too little salt and would all die. Estuary plants, who
don't care about the salt content, do care about water pressure... and would
all die long before the corals (see above) would. After Ye Floode would come
Ye Dust Storm, as the wind dries up the mud and blows away the topsoil
because there's no ground cover left to preserve it, it's all dead in Ye
Floode.

Problem 8: Aquatic life. Gen 7-8 simply does not mention aquatic life,
animals or plant. Perhaps fish don't have "the breath of life", as they
don't breath air, but whales and seals and such do. Did Noah carry whales
andseals on Ye Arke, too, and if so were they clean or unclean? (Whales
aredescended from hooved, cud-chewing animals, and even still have
multiple-chambered stomachs, and so should be Oclean'; that's seven of
Oem... Seals are, I think, descended from weasels, so they might be
Ounclean'.) The vast majority of marine animals don't like it if there's too
little salt, or too much water pressure, or both; a Floode that could reach
above Everest would kill them all. (Some marine life _loves_ pressure, and
die if there's too little, which creates a different problem, see below) The
vast majority of fresh-water animals don't like it if there's too much salt,
and are far less pressure-resistant than marine life (how deep can you go in
a lake, anyway?) (except for Lake Baikal, that is...) so Ye Floode would
kill them, too. Worse, the Bible expressly states that all creatures not on
board Ye Arke died in Ye Floode. Noah now has to have large aquaria on his
wooden barge... I'm kinda curious as to how Noah kept the pressure on the
tanks containing the deep-ocean life, so that they wouldn't die from
decompression. And how he kept the seven whales happy. Let's see... a tank
big enough to hold seven whales, so that they could swim around and use
their baleen plates to sift out the plankton. And another tank to grow more
plankton for Oem, as seven whales are gonna eat a lot of plankton. Unless,
of course, the whales can be convinced to eat hay... I can see it now. No
teeth, but eating hay. And, of course, the toothed whales (sperm whales and
the various dolphins) would have to be kept away from the fish tanks, and if
the dolphins include a killer whale or two, away from the other whales and
the seals... And there had better not be any leopard seals in the seals, for
similar reasons. How big is this barge again?

Problem 9: Disease/parasites. Tapeworm, AIDs, leprosy, etc, they're all
living creatures too. If they were not on Ye Arke, they died. Some of them
_require_ a _living_ host. Which one or ones of Noah's crew carried herpes,
which hookworm, which Ebola? How about ticks, fleas, lice?

Problem #10: Latent heat of vaporisation. Do you know how much heat water
releases when it turns from vapour to liquid? Ever have a steam burn? 1gof
steam condenses to 1g of liquid water plus 2261 joules! A cubic meter of
water is a million grams and the surface of the Earth is 5.09 x 10^8 km2or
5.09 x1014 m2. Thus, if we drop a measely meter of water a day for 40days,
the amount of energy released is 2261 joules/g * 1,000,000 g/m3 *5.09*10^14
m3 per day or 1.15 * 10^24 joules a day or 249,300,000 megatonnes/day! The
pentagon would envy such an arsenal. Put another way, for every m of water
level increase, we have to release 2.261 billion joules/m2. At a rate of 1
m/day, this comes to 2.261 billion joules/day/m2 or a radiance of 26
kilowatts/m2, roughly 20 times the brightness of the sun! Result: The
atmosphere rapidly turns into incandescent plasma incinerating Noah and Ye
Arke. Nothing survives, the oceans boil and the land is baked into pottery.
There's more, but this has gotten too long already. If you _really_ want to
see why I use that sig, check out the t.o FAQs and run the calcs for
yourself. It's not difficult to do. It's simple. Anyone who takes Ye Arke
seriously either hasn't done the math or can't add.

There is a size limit on wooden ships due to leaking between the
planks. If you made a wooden ship the size of Noah's ark it would
sink pretty quickly even in a calm sea.

Hogging and breaching are the main problems with large ships.
There have also been found ships built with cord that used the
swelling of the wood in a flexible design to minimize leaks.

Most amusing (assuming flat seas ) is that the "solution" to hogging
and breaching can be found in the middle of the USA, right where the
fundie mindset is greatest.
I've yet to see a fundie use it.

Just ask Sam Clemmons.

I read Life on the Mississippi, but I don't remember anything therein
that would help an impossibly large boat float. Incidentally, I had
to look up "hogging" and "breaching" but I already understood their
consequences. The massive flexing of the ark would make it
unfloatable in anything other than a permanently calm sea. This is
why wooden ships topped out at a much smaller size, or became somewhat
sphere-like in shape. An ark of the dimensions cited in the Bible
would only float through divine grace, which then makes you wonder why
God went through that whole flood nonsense instead of just pronouncing
everyone but Noah and his family dead. It's a good thing Hitler
didn't have a magic ark and a magic rainstorm or he might have tried
it, too.

There is a size limit on wooden ships due to leaking between the
planks. If you made a wooden ship the size of Noah's ark it would
sink pretty quickly even in a calm sea.

Hogging and breaching are the main problems with large ships.
There have also been found ships built with cord that used the swelling of
the wood in a flexible design to minimize leaks.

Most amusing (assuming flat seas ) is that the "solution" to hogging and
breaching can be found in the middle of the USA, right where the fundie
mindset is greatest.
I've yet to see a fundie use it.

Just ask Sam Clemmons.

How about Noah find time to build a large ship in time for the big
flood....
How did he know when the flood will come....
How did he gathered all the animals......
He needed divine help but he never ask devine for no flood......
For he had no pity for all other humen to be drawn by the flood.....
For he never been mentioned to curse his god in killing all the
humen....

There is a admeasurement absolute on board ships due to aperture amid the planks. If you fabricated a board address the admeasurement of Noah's ark it would sink appealing bound even in a calm sea. Now brainstorm such a address in an ocean, with after-effects that had been apprenticed by a wind back that extended all the way about the apple l.